For the millionaire earners who generate an outsized share of New York State's income tax receipts, a possible congressional deal to trim the top tax rate in the final federal tax reform bill would take some of the sting out of losing the state and local tax (SALT) deduction.[Read_more]

The lame-duck supervisor of Hempstead, New York’s largest town, has inked the most indefensible no-layoff deal in Long Island’s history of open-handed labor relations—guaranteeing union jobs while asking for nothing in return. [Read_more]

Federal officials have reportedly confirmed that they are cutting off a major portion of funding for New York’s Essential Plan, opening a roughly $1 billion hole in the state budget and raising new doubts about the future of a rapidly growing health insurance option for the working poor. [Read_more]

Governor Andrew Cuomo has signed a bill mandating broad insurance coverage for three-dimensional mammography, formally known as digital breast tomosynthesis, despite a lack of evidence about the long-term efficacy of the procedure. [Read_more]

A bill requiring health plans to cover digital breast tomosynthesis, a three-dimensional type of mammography, has been delivered to Governor Andrew Cuomo’s office for his signature or veto. If the measure is enacted into law, it would be a classic case of healthcare politics rushing ahead of medical science. [Read_more]

For a second consecutive year, the state Public Service Commission (PSC) has deeply slashed the amount of renewable energy that utility companies are forced to buy under Governor Andrew Cuomo’s Clean Energy Standard (CES). The move casts further doubt on the governor’s goal of having renewables supply 50 percent of the state’s electricity by 2030—while reinforcing the CES program’s status as primarily a bailout for money-losing upstate nuclear plants. [Read_more]

For the eighth consecutive year, New York's governor and Legislature have failed to comply with a decade-old law designed to foster a "quick start" of the state budget process for the next fiscal year. [Read_more]

The largest upstate New York metro areas had weak or declining private job numbers in October, and the state as a whole trailed the national employment trend, according to the latest year-over-year data from the state Labor Department. [Read_more]

The lead editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal highlights the role that high taxes have played in driving migration trends out of New York and other high-tax states.

Marginal tax rates matter, as the Journal very correctly points out. Unfortunately, in making this important point, the editorial relies a bit too much on a misinterpretation of migration data produced by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), which tracks the movement of taxpayers among the 50 states. [Read_more]

Ten days after the report's Halloween due date, Governor Cuomo's Division of the Budget (DOB) has just issued a mid-year Financial Plan update that might as well be wearing a fright mask.

The update reduces revenue projections by $850 million this year, and by another $850 in each of the next two years, mostly as a result of an estimated $750 million drop in annual personal income tax reductions. [Read_more]

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About the Empire Center

The Empire Center is an independent, non-partisan, non-profit think tank located in Albany, New York. Our mission is to make New York a better place to live and work by promoting public policy reforms grounded in free-market principles, personal responsibility, and the ideals of effective and accountable government.